Cape Canaveral Chase, May 28, 2011
It was a long grueling race, upwind all the way in about 10-15 knots from the SE. It was just choppy to start with, but later on got a little rough, but not too bad. Our crew was Cozette, Andrew and myself. We took turns steering and everyone did a great job. Our biggest problem was, Cozette had made BLTs for dinner and left them at home.
The course was from the Ponce Sea Buoy to the Hertzel Shoal Red #8, about 38 nm, to the Canaveral Sea Buoy Red#2, about 17 nm. The four boats were stagger started so it was who crossed the finish first. Sailaway started first at noon, Morning Dew started at about 13 minute mark, Misty started at the 21 minute mark, and Twilight started at about the 41 minute mark. (Twilight just got back from finishing 3rd overall in a big fleet in the Regatta Del Sol to Mexico.) Sailaway was barely in sight when we started. We chased down Morning Dew in a couple of hours, but Sailaway was staying well out front for a long time. I am not sure why, but all of a sudden he fell off toward the beach. When he tacked and crossed in front of us, we covered him and were only about an half mile behind. At the next tack we had caught up quite a bit and then after a few miles, were able to pass him to leeward. We had gotten ahead quite a bit as it was getting dark. I charted my position and discovered that we were approaching the security zone of the Space Center, so I tacked out to sea; Sailaway must have continued on. We got on the wrong side of about a 15 degree wind shift to the South, so when we tacked and eventually crossed paths with Sailaway, he was back in front about a quarter of a mile. We tacked again to cover him and as we followed him out to sea on starboard tack, Twilight came down on us on port tack. I could tell that he was going in front of us and in the dark (no moon) I could not tell how close we were, so I pulled up and made sure he got by. He was probably safely ahead, but it was hard to tell. We were catching Sailaway, so I decided to cover when he tacked again and on that leg, we passed him again. We pulled away from him and he never was close again. We rounded the Hertzel Shoal light sometime around 12:30 and sailed to the R#2 on a close reach. We had lost our instruments because the batteries were low, so we were struggling in the dark to figure out how to trim, but we must have been sailing on port tack at about 50 deg. to the wind. I had lost track of Twilight and figured that he would be well ahead because he is fast and had crossed in front of Misty earlier. We were about three miles from the finish when I spotted him toward the beach. It looked like Misty was a little ahead of him. I thought for a long time that we were neck and neck and he was sailing a tighter angle to make the mark, but as we got closer together, he started pulling ahead. He crossed the finish about a two minutes ahead of us after 15 hours of sailing.
We intended to sail home, but after an hour or so the wind died. Misty had been struggling with overheating, so around dawn, I checked the water levels and cranked the engine. (I still had enough battery on the reserve bank to crank.) She ran fine all the way home. I put the autopilot on and let her run. One strange thing happened. I put out two fishing poles. We were running along doing about 6 knots. I was lying on the starboard cockpit bench. I looked up and saw a monofilament fishing line running forward. I got up and sure enough, the starboard line went forward, around the bow pulpit and was trailing the lure down the port side of the boat. No one noticed any pull on the pole or line going out. How did that happen? Cozette said that she had checked the poles a few minutes before and everything was normal.
We got to the Inlet at noon and docked at SYC around 1:30. Everyone was exhausted. Overnight races are for younger people.
Here are the reported finish times:
Twilight: 3:20:24
Misty: 3:22:20
Sailaway: 4:02:41
Morning Dew: 5:01:02
1 comments:
good accounting of the events, sounds like a fun time to me
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